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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Beware of Firefox Add-ons!

If you are using Firefox, chances are you use more than a few Add-ons or extensions. After all, they have been one of the main strengths of the Mozilla browser. If you do, though, you should know that such extensions might have an impact on performance. In fact, the impact can be so significant that Mozilla themselves have decided to publish a list with the 10 (on the main view, there are more listed) Add-ons that slow Firefox down the most and surprisingly, that list includes some of the most popular extensions available!

Click on image to enlarge.

I personally only use a couple extensions myself, none of which is listed here, but if you do use many and feel Firefox takes forever to start up or has less than acceptable performance, you may benefit from visiting this SITE and learning which extensions could be the root cause of your problem. Most popular extensions have alternatives available, so you might be better off disabling that particularly slow Add-on and installing a similar one.

5 comments:

Good post! I'm converting to FF 4 and have decided to drop Xmarks now that they are ending support for password syncing and switching to Firefox Sync instead. I'm happy to see that NoScript is not on the list of worst performers as I would be lost without it.

@William: Thanks, glad you found that useful.@Subaili: Chrome extensions could be poorly coded as well. The problem is with certain extensions, not all, and certainly not with the browser itself. Having said so, if you like Chrome better, by all means use it. I would only recommend using Chromium instead.